Tolerating intolerance

In the 2019 film Article 15,  Ayan Ranjan, a policeman posted to a rural district in Uttar Pradesh (played by Ayushman Khurana), tells his partner Aditi in Delhi about the indifference in a village after two Dalit girls were murdered. “I will unmess the mess,” he tweets. Is unmess a word, Aditi asks. If it is, then Aparna Vaidik’s My Son’s Inheritance: A Secret History of Lynching and Blood Justice in India takes half a step towards “unmessing” or at least revealing the inherent violence at the root of Indian culture.

Ms Vaidik’s book is framed as a narrative to her son in which she demonstrates how violence has pervaded mythologies, folklore and language. She begins by talking about her grandfather, who often told her ancestral folktales. One that stuck in her head concerned her ancestor Bharmall, from Rajasthan. According to the legend, Bharmall, an accountant, immolated himself after a local Muslim butcher ignored his pleas to stop slaughtering cows. Ms Vaidik uses this story to explain how the ascendancy of the Rajputs in Rajasthan and the concomitant growth of Vaishnavism turned cattle protection into a sacred duty. As a result, the meaning of gauraksha  shifted from protecting cows from disease to protecting them from the butcher, specifically the Muslim butcher (a shift that eventually hit Rajasthan’s leather goods industry, once part of a prosperous agro-pastoral economy). 

Ms Vaidik goes on to explain how language became a marker of “racial” difference. In this narrative, fair-skinned Sanskrit speakers and dark-skinned Dravidian speakers are two different racial groups and Sanskrit-speaking Aryans are the builders of Indian civilisation. The notion took root thanks to thinkers such as Swami Vivekananda, who believed that Aryans settled in India without annihilating the first inhabitants. In his view, the caste system was simply a way of organising society’s labour. For 19th century reformers, the Aryan tradition was synonymous with “Hindu” From this, evolved “the idea of Hinduism as a civilisation coterminous with India —spiritual and non-violent —a utopia for Aryans,” she writes. Others such as Dayanand Saraswati placed cow-protection at the core of Aryan ideology. This movement “was successful in rallying all shades of Hindus”. 

The movement inventively used the developing print and journal culture to spread its cause so generations grew up immersed in this culture. The image of the cow as the mother of all Hindus was mass-produced.  These images started appearing in journals and calendars and “made its way to family altars and knick-knacks like coin boxes”. The movement, she writes, was also an attempt at stopping lower caste Hindus from converting to Islam. To this end, the Arya Samaj started inviting lower-caste groups for festivals. This “Hindu juggernaut” created an “affective community of violence” that forged the Hindu and Muslim identities as separate and antagonistic. Still, Ms Vaidik points out, these movements failed to garner support from south and north-east India because they “disregarded their socio-economic context”. 

Ms Vaidik points to the fact that the major success of the 20th century cow protection mobilisation was forging “a new Hindu identity — a community that was united in its belief of the cow’s sacredness and the urgent need to protect it”. This led to the formation of a new discourse in which cow protection came to mark the difference between the Hindu “self” and Muslim “other” as in Bharmall’s. 

Ms Vaidik moves on to describe how myths have played an important role in normalising violence. For instance, there was Barbareek, son of Ghatotkach and from a Mleccha tribe (considered outside the caste system). In one of the myths he sacrificed himself at the hands of Krishna. “His sacrifice ensured Arjuna remained the supreme warrior because had he fought, he would have upstaged him,” Ms Vaidik writes. This myth played a dual role — of maintaining social cohesion and invisibilising violence. She adds that this myth is also about miscegenation—racial intermixing, drawing a similarity with Eklavya and Karna, who also paid the “blood price” to make Arjuna the mightiest warrior. It is upon these myths that Ms Vaidik questions the idea of India being an inherently tolerant state. “A role of normalising and invisibilising violence in various forms — pejorative naming, erasure of personhood, [are] … all done in the name of maintaining order of things,” she says. 

The author then examines the legacy of Jyotiba Phule, the Maharashtrian social activist and one of the first people to point out that violence, not tolerance was the essence of India. He figured that patriarchy and oppression of lower castes went hand in hand. Ms Vaidik questions how, despite all his efforts, Aryan superiority thrived as a national ideology. She says the Dalit movement developed in isolation; the British didn’t pay Phule much heed, the Congress drained lower-caste movements and the Left focused on the urban proletariat. 

Turning to contemporary politics, Ms Vaidik shows how the discourse of “Hindu victimhood” seeps into our consciousness through these myths.  The author ends the book by comparing Aryan supremacy to white supremacy in the US and examines the reasons for lynchings that marked the first term of Narendra Modi’s prime ministership. 

Throughout the book, Ms Vaidik challenges the notion that India is a country that believes in non-violence and shows how violence had been “externalised, othered and justified in the name of enacting social justice”. Or as she tell her son:  “Hinsa bhi tumhaari dharohar hai,” (violence is also your heritage).